McConnell Lectureship: Professor Petra Schwille, Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry
McConnell Lectureship: Professor Petra Schwille, Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (Host: Steven Boxer)
"Towards a minimal set of modules for cellular life"
About the Seminar
In recent decades, biophysics has accumulated an impressive selection of techniques to analyze biological systems with ultimate sensitivity and precision, down to the single molecule level. However, a strictly quantitative application of most of these techniques in living cells or organisms has been challenging, because of the enormous complexity and redundancy of cellular processes. The more physiological a system under study, the harder it is to define a manageable number of relevant control parameters. This renders it necessary to accumulate ever more data and thus, often extends cellular studies to hardly manageable sizes. An alternative approach is to deconstruct the biological phenomenon to its fundamental features, by reconstituting them in a bottom-up approach. Identifying such minimal biological systems, particularly of subcellular structures and modules, has in the past years been very successful, and highly quantitative in vitro experiments with reduced complexity could be performed, e.g., on reconstituted cytoskeleton and membrane systems. As a particularly exciting example for the power of minimal systems, we demonstrated the self-organization of MinCDE, essential proteins of the bacterial cell division machinery, leading to a protein-based pacemaker and spatiotemporal cue for downstream events, such as the positioning of contractile rings. In my talk, I will discuss the perspective of assembling a minimal machinery for cell division.
About the Speaker
Prof. Schwille graduated in physics from the University of Göttingen in 1996 and performed her PhD research in the department of Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen at the Max Planck Institute of biophysical chemistry in Göttingen. In her PhD, she developed a new single molecule-based spectroscopic technique (FCCS) to analyze dynamics and interactions of minute amounts of biomolecules. As a Full Professor of Biophysics in Dresden from 2002 to 2012, she contributed greatly to the quantitative investigation of protein-protein and protein-membrane interactions in living cells and organisms. Since her recruitment to the Max Planck Society in 2011 as a Director at the MPI of Biochemistry, she has shifted her focus towards the construction of minimal life-like systems in a bottom-up synthetic biology approach.